I've tried to get into the game twice and both times I just hated it. It's been a while but I'll try to remember all my gripes:
The characters: you have absolutely no reason to care about any of them. They're all boring, they're all whiney and annoying, and none of them really have any reason to be there.
The story: Both times I tried to get into this games I made it through around 12-16 hours and the game was just boring. The story does nothing to keep you going. Mixed with the beyond boring characters with no real motivation the game just sucks. I don't know if it was because it was trying to be too political or what but the story just bored me to tears.
The Gambit system: good idea but doesn't work that great. I love the idea of the gambit system and how you can customize it, the thing I hate is that you have to buy the cards and work to an actually good system. By the time you finally start getting the good gambits you just don't care. I remember both times when I quit the game I was starting to finally get some really good options but I just stopped caring. If they would have just let me have a lot of those options from the start I would have loved it.
The license system: shitty. This was by far one of the dumbest leveling systems I've ever seen. Every character has the same exact grid so there's no reason to make your characters any different. Congratulations SE! You've managed to make your already boring characters even more boring by making them all carbon copies of each other. Sure, I could level them different through the grid but there's no reason to. License points are easy to come by so yeah, no reason to make them different.
So yes, FFXII sucks. Sure it's pretty and the voice acting is wonderful but that doesn't make up for the terrible characters that have no reason to be there, the boring characters, the pathetic excuse for a story that was copied anyways, and the bad leveling system just make it a bad game.
